otton was the miracle fiber of the nineteenth century, when textile manufacturing was the high-tech, high-growth business of the day. Like all farm products, cotton was subject to the vagaries of the weather, pests, and political risks, but for decades it sold into fast growing and weakly contested world markets. On the eve of the Civil War, cotton was “King”. Compressed in dirty white bales, upland cotton from the American South was the developing nation’s largest export, earning the lion’s share of its foreign exchange. It provided the “satanic mills” of England with 92 percent of their supply, and fueled the heart of industrial enterprise in the American Northeast.

One hundred years later, 300,000 American cotton growers (cotton farmers are “growers”) were beset with severe threats to their livelihoods. As the crop’s cultivation had gradually expanded throughout the world, U.S. cotton had lost ground in the global market. At home, in their biggest market, man-made textile fibers – rayon, nylon, and polyester – had launched a fearsome assault on cotton’s fabric and apparel business. Synthetics producers were giant corporations, and had the financial muscle to support research and promotion.

Independent and small-scale as businesses go, cotton growers were well organized for political purposes. Their main concerns were to keep themselves from growing too much cotton and to seek government support for research and relief from hard times and market fluctuations. The National Cotton Council, created in 1939, and its offspring, the Memphis, Tenn.-based Cotton Producers Institute (CPI), had proven adept at influencing national farm policy. But as the 1960s wore on, these organizations were not able to help growers compete. Cotton’s share of the market for retail apparel and home fabrics plummeted from 63% in 1960 to about 45% in 1970, on the way to its historical low of 33% in 1975.

Farmers supply, but their fate is much more the story of demand. It was clear that this most traditional of American industries would need to embrace a fresh approach. Cotton growers, always attentive to the problems of supply, would have to learn how to market their crop. The industry was entrenched in 18 states spanning the Old South and new rural Sunbelt, but its new champions would emerge from the urban corporate world: an advertising executive from Connecticut, a graphic designer in San Francisco, and marketing gurus of Madison Avenue.

In April 1970, half a dozen entrepreneurial growers moved to save their industry. Through the agency of the CPI, they sought professional help, and found it in the unlikely persona of Dukes Wooters, an advertising executive at Readers Digest. Wooters had a classic New England pedigree: the Taft School, Lehigh University, military service in World War II, and Harvard Business School. He knew next to nothing about cotton.

Blessed with an unforgettable name and a deep arresting voice, Wooters was a hard-driving salesman, a marketing man with great instincts for what would move off the shelves. At 53, he had just turned-around the Digest’s sagging operation in Brazil and was looking for one last great career challenge. “Dukes had style,” one grower said. He shopped at Brooks Brothers, but to prepare for his interview with the CPI leadership, he cruised through Macy’s. “I looked around,” he said, recalling his surprise, “and there was hardly any cotton.” Brooks Brothers was the carriage trade; Wooters wanted to move cotton back into the mass market by the trainload.

Clearing the Ground

No city was more closely identified with a commodity than Memphis was with cotton. CPI’s research staff was based there, and a small marketing organization, comprising mainly Memphians, was lodged in tatter-down offices in the Empire State Building. Wooters let them go, all but one. As Wooters tried to explain to one nonplussed cotton grower, “you’re not just raising a crop, you’re selling fashion on Seventh Avenue.”

To compete, growers would have to embrace the big-city, consumer-driven culture of marketing. CPI’s headquarters were moved to New York. Its research operations were transferred to Raleigh, near North Carolina State University’s textile school and near many of the country’s major cotton textile manufacturers. Wooters determined that CPI would have to change its name, too. It was a publicly funded body, but Wooters chose “Cotton Incorporated.” He intended to run Cotton Incorporated as if it were “a real company,” like Readers Digest or, for that matter, cotton’s nemesis, that great innovator in synthetic fibers, DuPont.

Cotton Incorporated had a total annual operating budget of just $20 million to pay for marketing, research and administration. Its funds came from a voluntary contribution of cotton growers channeled to it by the Department of Agriculture’s Cotton Board (Today the assessments are mandated by law.) Yet the company’s mission was ambitious, embracing almost every aspect of production and distribution. Wooters saw the cotton market as a continuous loop that bound thousands of growers to millions of consumers through the good offices of textile mills, clothing manufacturers, and retailers. The relationships all along the loop were dynamic and interdependent. A “total marketing” approach was necessary.

Total marketing meant developing plans to link the mills, clothing manufacturers, retailers and consumers together into a mutually reinforcing chain of profit maximization. The mills were the first customers, and they would be offered technical assistance free of charge. Caring for them was crucial because they preferred synthetics. Cotton, like wine, was highly variable in quality; synthetics were uniform, easier and cheaper to process in volume.

Total marketing meant conveying back to those engaged in research and technical services ideas from the marketplace for new and improved fabrics and finishes. It meant arming manufacturers and retailers with new fashion ideas that could be interpreted in cotton and cotton-synthetic blends.

All that would be possible if, and only if, mills, manufacturers and retailers were confident that the demand for cotton was there. Most dramatically and publicly, Cotton Incorporated would stimulate consumer demand with advertising and promotions, not of cotton as an agricultural commodity – “that funny looking white stuff,” as Wooters called it – but of cotton as a brand.

Cotton’s Seal

The first step in converting cotton from an agricultural commodity into a consumer brand was the creation of a new image. Cotton, Wooters felt, had an image problem going back a lot farther than the stodgy dungarees-and faded-cotton-frock-memories of rural America. Ironically, the image of rural work clothes would prove to be a key to cotton’s salvation.

While visiting Levi Strauss in 1971, Wooters called on the noted designer Walter Landor in San Francisco, who presented 12 versions to Cotton Incorporated. The chosen design for the “Seal of Cotton” – one that Lander’s daughter, Susan, had conceived, would become one of the most successful trademarks in the annals of marketing. It was simple and engaging – a white cotton boll, rising up from the two T’s of the word “cotton,” laid against a background of earth-tone brown.

The seal appeared in 1973, and almost instantly gave cotton a new identity, making a deep impact on public awareness, a rare masterpiece of graphic design-as-communication. The design conveyed several positive messages. If nature was good, then cotton was good. Cotton had roots, but it also had bloom. Cotton was pure, soft, comforting and natural. Cotton was something familiar that you wanted to have and to keep around.

Creating Consumption

From its inception, the seal would stand at the center of an intensive and innovative advertising campaign designed to “pull” cotton back into consumer consciousness. The broad middle class of consumers of Wooters’s generation – those who came of age in the 1930s and 1940s – had largely forsaken cotton for the wash-and-wear convenience and economy of synthetics. But it happened that their children, however, the baby boomers born between 1946 and 1964, were clad in cotton, or, to be more exact, in denim.

Denim’s history reached back into the nineteenth century. Though not indigenous in origin, denim – used in dungarees or overalls – had become the quintessential American fabric. In the 1960s, denim took on a new appeal for the young. Blue jeans looked unkempt, required little care, were comfortable and, most important, projected an image that rebuked the buttoned-down fashion statements of the boomers’ parents’ generation. An emblem of protest, jeans were bound up with rebellious acts ranging from recreational drug use to civil rights and antiwar demonstrations.

The worry for cotton growers was that boomers might abandon denim as they aged. The problem, then, was not just to sell jeans to contemporary customers, but to do what synthetic manufacturers had done so well: sell “fiber consciousness.” In order to craft its own approach to advertising, Cotton Incorporated’s marketing staff spent months studying the master, DuPont, the leading synthetic-fiber manufacturer. What they learned was that they must focus the market’s attention on the performance characteristics of cotton garments.

Television Guides

Cotton’s consumer advertising began in 1971. The medium was almost exclusively network television. This tactic set cotton apart from other agricultural marketing programs. The first ads in 1971, created by the Jack Byrne Agency, honed in on a budding cultural notion that had its origins in the boomers’ counterculture of the 1960s: if something was “natural,” then it must, somehow, be better. These ads carried the tag line “Cotton: It’s a Natural Wonder” (with “Brought to You by Cotton Incorporated and America’s Cotton Growers” tucked in at the bottom of the screen). Viewers learned that they liked those scruffy old blue jeans because “Levi’s‚ still makes them – all 100 percent cotton.”

The effectiveness of Cotton Incorporated’s advertising can be ascribed to the company’s long running relationship with the advertising agency, Ogilvy & Mather (O&M), whose co-founder David Ogilvy was an evangelist for branding. Cotton Incorporated had little to spend by large corporate standards, and the dispersion of its funds was politically sensitive. Hence, O&M faced a dilemma. How could it create ads for cotton that were high impact yet cost effective, carefully targeted and yet universally appealing? The seal was key. Animated for television, it grew in a few seconds before the viewer’s eyes, up from the good brown earth into a full-blown soft, white cotton boll.

O&M found selective, high-impact venues for cotton without breaking the bank. For example, Cotton Incorporated focused most of its 1976 advertising dollars on the Olympic Winter Games at Innsbruck in Austria. A fruitful media tie-in was cotton’s regular appearance, starting in 1977, on NBC’s TODAY Show, an association that vaulted Cotton Incorporated into the front ranks of consumer advertising. As more cotton products were selected for promotion, familiar television personalities delivered live commercials on the set. Viewers saw Barbara Walters in a bright Hawaiian shirt posed beside the Seal in a tropical setting, exuding confidence that cotton was “doing a lot to make your life more comfortable. I know it’s making my life comfortable right now.”

It all worked like a charm, producing brand awareness and stimulating consumption. After one year, 18% of consumers could identify the seal. By the end of 1976, when awareness of the seal jumped to 46%, cotton’s market share edged upward to 36%. (Today more than 70% of American consumers recognize the symbol, even without the word “cotton.”)

The seal was used, for a transitional period, to mark cotton-dominant “blends,” one way to help re-capture market share. The 60/40% cotton/synthetic shirt became commonplace on men’s store shelves. Then in 1977 and 1978, Levi Strauss attempted a denim blend. The mix was modest (never more than 15% polyester), but the strategy was a marketing disaster for the jeans maker. An aroused Cotton Incorporated pounded away at the heresy, reminding consumers that the denim they had known and loved since childhood was “100% cotton.”

A revised denim campaign featured pretty young women viewed from the rear, in tight denim jeans, available – along with lawnmowers, washing machines and power tools – at your friendly hometown Sears. The implication was clear: in a world filled with fakery, cotton was real. It performed the way you wanted. Wearing it made you look and feel good, not just physically, but emotionally too. The long-term message was: “Come home to cotton!”

Touting Performance

Cotton’s market share took off in the 1980s, from 36 to 50%. The nation was emerging from a decade that had included defeat in Vietnam, two oil shocks, rampant inflation, and deteriorating competitiveness. The economy and corporate America were now in the process of repair, and the nation’s mood edged toward a new confidence. Cotton’s advertising voice grew more confident, too.

O&M co-opted an idea from the synthetics manufacturers, of identifying cotton as a “performance” fiber. (This was a claim made possible by technical improvements in cotton fabrics, driven partially by better breeding programs.) Television viewers were wowed as ballerina Heather Watts pirouetted in front of New York’s Lincoln Center and proclaimed the wonders of her 100% cotton Ship’n Shore™ shirts: “All cotton plus permanent press: now that’s high performance.”

The “True Performance” campaign, originated at Cotton Incorporated and developed and executed by O&M evoked probably the most compelling image of cotton since coining of the phrase “King Cotton” in the 1850s. Cyclists, sailors and pole-vaulters strenuously “performed” in their cotton duds, as “True Performance” dominated Cotton Incorporated advertising through the eighties. The campaign included an elaborate labeling effort at the retail level. Attractive “True Performance” hang-tags, depicting the slogan and the Seal, appeared on millions of garments in the biggest retailers and smallest specialty shops, alike.

“True Performance” was a watershed campaign. But demand for particular types of cotton apparel and home furnishings, like demand for many other consumer products, inevitably varied with fashion and the whim of consumer tastes. The challenge therefore was to even-out these peaks and valleys by cultivating loyalty to cotton as an essential component of the good life.

“The Fabric of Our Lives”

Dukes Wooters left Cotton Incorporated in 1982, and in 1987, its president Nicholas Hahn took a new approach to advertising. In focus groups and one-on-one interviews, people were invited to talk about fiber, fabrics, garments, cotton, wool, polyester, and anything to do with clothing. Something surprising was discovered. Interviewees said that wool was warm and scratchy, and that polyester was sticky, hot and did not breathe. But they also professed “something” (they did not know what exactly) “about the feel of cotton.” While talking about cotton, they tended to touch themselves, whether or not they were wearing it. Some prompting got subjects to talk about how they liked having cotton close to their skin, and how little babies get wrapped in cotton, and other emotion-laden images connecting cotton with life’s various stages.

Based on this news, O&M concocted the deceptively simple phrase, “The Fabric of Our Lives‚” for a campaign that would become one of the most memorable in advertising history. The documentary filmmaker Leslie Dektor’s avant-guard realism, aimed at showing people as they were, did not talk about performance features at all. The target audience had changed, so now the message was intergenerational. Cotton was authentic, from “cradle to grave,” not just for the baby boomers, but their parents and, before long, their children, too.

For the launch of the Fabric of Our Lives campaign, Hahn authorized an expenditure of $2 million of the company’s $7 million advertising budget in one day – Thanksgiving 1989, the day before the single largest shopping spree of the year. It was the day when families watched television dawn to dusk, from the Macy’s Parade through professional football games to the “Sound of Music.” Cotton commercials blanketed the screen, as one hundred fourteen million viewers saw and heard them, over and over again.

The size of Cotton Incorporated’s expenditure enabled O&M to negotiate for reinforcing billboard space. “Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, Brought to you [in part] by Cotton Incorporated. Cotton: The Fabric of Our Lives.” Subsequently, O&M sought to sustain Cotton Incorporated’s media “presence” with key franchise positions – twice a week with Willard Scott on TODAY; beside Peter Jennings on ABC News; on Late Night with Jay Leno; and on other highly rated shows.

Getting Emotional

Cotton and the good life went together, like parents and children in happy homes. Cotton’s unvarnished advertising “reality” confounded some critics, but it was, in O&M’s word, “emotionally relevant.” In the late 1980s and 1990s, the linkage between liking a product and perceiving it as authentic accounted for some of the great brand successes of the era, like Starbucks™, The Body Shop™ and Virgin Atlantic™. The old association of cotton with everything that was “real,” first tried out in the 1970s but with a hard edge aimed to bash the “plastic” world of synthetics, blossomed in the mid-1990s in a softer, multicultural form.

In the 1990s, the Fabric of Our Lives‚ campaign embraced more modish themes. One ad featured an African-American family, sitting around the dining room table in a reprise of the Norman Rockwell image of Thanksgiving dinner. There are multiple generations, nattily turned-out, nice up-market surroundings, lots of smiles. “How different can we be,” went the voiceover for a spot featuring a rainbow coalition of cotton-clad actors, “when we all love to wear the same thing?” The actors in the ads appeared younger. Research showed that turn-of-the-millennium teens and young adults liked cotton well enough but displayed lower “fiber-consciousness” than their parents. The job of educating the market was never-ending.

On the cusp of the twenty-first century, an abrupt change occurred in workaday fashion that was tailor-made for cotton. Corporate America went casual, and cotton supplied the alternative, as male corporate America doffed its woolen suits and female corporate America its linens and silks, for open collared shirts and comfortable-fitting khakis. “What would it be like,” came the question as the screen filled with diverse hard-working Americans, “if we all dressed as if work were fun?”

Corporate casual dress, of course, was a hallmark of the dot-com era. Yet while that particular bubble has burst, cotton’s staying power has not. Consolidating the gains it had made in the 1970s and 1980s, cotton closed the millennium with a more than 60% share of the market for retail apparel and home fabrics. What other industry (or company, for that matter) has ever lost nearly half its market share and won it back?

Competition and Survival

The story of cotton’s renaissance is not solely a story of consumer marketing. Dukes Wooters had envisioned from the outset that Cotton Incorporated would have to meet rising consumer expectations with ever-improving fiber quality, or gains in market share could not be sustained. Competitive threats – from low-cost synthetics and low-wage foreign producers – would have to be checked with relentless quality improvements and cost-reductions on the farm.

The practical result of his vision is that the American cotton one wears today is far superior to the cotton of forty years ago. It’s easier to fabricate and to care for.The industry invests in research and development spanning fundamental agricultural science to farm-level technological improvements. Today, cottonseed research traverses the cutting edge of genetic engineering. Cotton can be grown in colors. Enterprising growers invest in automated tractors that can till the land to fine precision, locating their positions with within two centimeters, day or night, in all weather, increasing yields, lowering labor costs. And hungry textile mills (though they have mostly moved overseas) get what they want most: American cotton that is longer, stronger, finer, cleaner, and cheaper.

It’s a good thing, too. Cotton growing is a ruthlessly competitive global enterprise. Cultivated in more places around the world, cotton trades more freely than ever. American growers have learned to manage demand but cannot administer price. As quality has improved and as costs, and prices, have come down, it has been a boon to consumers, a challenge to growers. Despite mounting subsidies from the government, to compensate them for losses in low-price commodity markets, the pressure on cotton growers to deliver higher quality for less is unabated. Staying competitive demands a high level of scientific and business sophistication. It requires investment in technology, management, and marketing, and a broad-based knowledge of world affairs, from the weather in Australia to political conditions in Pakistan, from what’s fashionable in Paris to what’s happening in the world’s genetic and biochemical laboratories.

In this dynamic environment, only the strongest survive. Farms have consolidated to increase capital and scale economies. Marginal land has been abandoned, given over to other crops, converted into housing developments and shopping malls. That some 30,000 cotton growers (just a tenth of the number in 1960!) are still in business in the U.S., producing more and better cotton at lower cost, is testimony to their collective mastery of the market.

George David Smith is clinical professor of economics and international business at NYU Stern. He is a member of the faculty of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

Timothy Curtis Jacobson is a partner in The Winthrop Group, Inc. This article is adapted from their new book, Cotton’s Renaissance: A Study in Market Innovation (Cambridge University Press).